The Philadelphia Quarry

by Howard Owen

  “Well,” Bitsy says, “you do what you have to do. I was just passing along some information, hoping some intrepid reporter would jump all over it.”

  She sounds smug. She knows she has me. She probably knows I won’t farm this one out, either. I can’t send Sarah Goodnight out there snooping around with a garden spade and penlight in the middle of the night, and I don’t want Baer horning in any more than I’ve let him already.

  Dammit, I want this one myself.

  “I’ll call you when I get back,” Bitsy says.

  “Break a leg,” I tell her.

  “You’re supposed to say that before a play, not a ski trip. . . . Oh, I get it. Funny.”

  I need to see the Quarry again, and those houses above it. I think they call it casing the joint. I call Kate.

  “The Quarry? What for?”

  I don’t tell her everything, as was my custom even when we were married. I tell her that there’s something I want to check out there, and I’ll tell her if I see what I think I’m going to see.

  I hear her sigh.

  “Shithead,” she says. “Why should I take off from work to chauffeur a wild goose chase?”

  “Because it might be what you and Marcus need to get Slade out of jail. Besides, you’re on sabbatical.”

  She’s quiet for a few seconds, then tells me that she can’t get away until after one. She’ll pick me up in front of the Prestwould.

  I’ve been outside ten minutes, standing in the slush, when she pulls into the handicap space.

  She motions with her hand as I start to get in, and I take one last puff before throwing the cigarette to the curb and stomping it out.

  “You’re going to make the whole car smell like tobacco,” she says. “You know, when that shit finally kills you, they won’t even be able to give your clothes to Goodwill. Your car’s going to be a total loss, too.”

  And yet, I’m thinking, you were able to hold your breath long enough to do the nasty with me last week.

  Tired of lecturing, she looks over at me, shakes her head, and asks, “Where to?”

  The Quarry is just as abandoned as you might think it would be on the first of February. Not a soul in sight. I’m not planning to stay here for more than a minute or two, then check out the houses up above.

  Kate parks the car. I walk over to the padlocked gate, and it looks like somebody’s broken the lock.

  “Somebody must have been dying for a January swim,” Kate says.

  I can’t think of a better explanation. There’s nothing worth stealing in here.

  There’s still a little bit of snow that hasn’t melted, here in the shadows. I can see the footprints. I follow them to the dressing rooms, to the men’s side. Kate’s right behind me. She’s probably as well off with me as back at the car. Plus, I can see that the prints go both in and out.

  The electricity’s been turned off for the winter, apparently, and I have to leave the door wide open to see anything. When my eyes adjust, I see the photograph, framed and sitting there on the bench.

  Kate looks at it, and we look at each other.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks.

  I have a hunch, but I’m not saying anything right now.

  “No telling.”

  “No telling as in you don’t know, or no telling as in you’re not telling.”

  “No telling,” I repeat.

  I talk her into driving up Lock Lane. It goes above the Quarry, and I have her stop at Harper and Simone Simpson’s old home. I persuade her to pull into the driveway. I get out, and through the cast-iron fence, I can see the patio, just the way Bitsy described it.

  “OK,” I say when I get back in the car, putting my hands up to the heater vent.

  “OK, what? You have to give me more than this, Willie, if you want me to help you.”

  So I tell her about the bricks, about what Bitsy Winston-Jones told me.

  “That sounds kind of farfetched.”

  “Yes, it does. But Alicia was afraid of something. She tried to let Bitsy know what it was, and it definitely had something to do with the bricks.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “No telling.”

  She lets me off at the Prestwould and declines my half-hearted offer for her to come up. Before she leaves, I ask her about the DUI and its possible consequences.

  “Do you think you can keep me from having to buy a bicycle?” I ask her, leaning into the open driver’s-side window.

  “No telling,” she says, and drives off.

  I walk down to the newspaper and spend some quality time with Sarah, who tells me about her exciting evening on night cops.

  “There was this guy,” she says, “who they caught stealing a flat-screen TV from Target. Somehow, he got it all the way out of the store with nobody noticing, but he didn’t have a getaway car. He had a getaway bus.”

  “Bus?”

  “Yeah. He waited for the city bus, he got on the bus, he left. Several people saw him, but I guess they didn’t want to get involved.”

  “So, did they catch him?”

  “Finally. The bus driver who picked him up said he got off at Broad, down by the state library. The driver said he helped him get it off the bus.”

  “Good samaritan.”

  “And then some cop in the East End stopped him as he was wrestling it down the street and they finally got him. I talked to the cop, and he said the guy was like one of those little birds you see, trying to carry off a piece of bread as big as he is.

  “But it’s crazy. He got almost all the way home with it. I mean, a lady phoned Target and told them what happened, that she’d seen this guy get on a city bus right outside the store with one of their flat-screen TVs in a box, and I guess that’s how they knew it was missing.”

  I scratch my head.

  “I guess they need to hire more security at Target. If we had full employment, we’d be able to catch the bad guys, or the bad guys would be working and wouldn’t have to steal flat-screen TVs. Maybe they ought to hire the bus bandit. Kill two birds with one stone.”

  “Bus bandit,” Sarah says. “That’s good. I’ll use that.”

  “You didn’t write it for today’s paper?”

  “Nah. Sally said they were all filled up last night, unless it was a murder or something. I put it on the website, though.”

  “Of course.”

  I tell Sarah what she needs to know about Wesley Simpson and the bricks.

  “So, you’re going to have a look.”

  “Probably.”

  I check the weather report. InaccuWeather on A2 says it’ll be bright and clear tonight, mostly cloudy tomorrow with a chance of rain or light snow.

  Sometime after six, I get Custalow to drive me back to Lock Lane. We sit two doors down from the Simpsons’ old place. There’s a light on in one of the upstairs windows.

  “What do you think?” Custalow says. I’ve brought him pretty much up to speed on why we’re sitting here in the Windsor Farms darkness like a couple of cat burglars.

  “I don’t know, but there’s only one person I can think of who might be in that house tonight.”

  He nods.

  Wesley Simpson should be “resting comfortably” at his sister’s home, but that apparently is not the case.

  “Maybe,” I tell Abe, “I’ll wait for the clouds to roll in.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Wednesday

  Our weather page nailed it, more or less. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

  It’s been cloudy and cold, spitting snow but no accumulation likely. Sitting here in the dark with the heater in my Accord going full blast, I’m almost disappointed not to see a light in any of the windows at the Simpsons’ old house. I’m looking for an excuse not to do this. It would be a good night to hunker down in a nice, warm bar. It is, by my reckoning, not a good night to be snooping around somebody else’s backyard, armed with a garden trowel.

  Custalow has his window open slig
htly, to let out some of the carcinogens. It’s my car and I’ll smoke if I want to.

  Abe’s my chauffeur tonight. Kate’s a trouper, but I thought it might be smarter to have someone a little larger and scarier come with me on this little sortie. To my knowledge, Custlow hasn’t done physical damage to anyone recently. But the potential is definitely there.

  But stealth isn’t Abe’s strong suit. I’m not sure he can even get over the fence separating me from the brick patio, and it’ll be easier for one out-of-shape old fart to do this undetected than it would be for two.

  I tell Abe to wait, I’ll be right back. We’re no more than 100 feet from the start of the circular drive at the front of the house. When Kate drove me up here yesterday, she said it was Georgian, and I told her it did kind of look like some of the houses I’d seen in Atlanta.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Abe asks me.

  I tell him I am. Actually, I’m not, but what are the choices? I’ve got less than five days left of the seven Grubby gave me to make chicken salad out of all this. What are the cops going to do if I tell them I think there might be some paper buried maybe somewhere under the brick patio of the late Harper and Simone Simpson’s home that might have something to do with their daughter’s death. Hell, if I was a cop, I wouldn’t put down my doughnut for that. They have a perfectly good suspect, good as it gets, all locked up. Why keep looking?

  “Sit,” I tell him. “Stay. And keep the heater running. I’m gonna be pretty cold when I get back.”

  “Nah,” he says, and cuts the engine off. He’s right, of course. The quieter, the better. The Accord, in need of a tune-up, will be like a neon sign flashing “burglars about” if it sits here idling on this very rich, very private street. The police probably will question Custalow just for being here, if they happen to drive by. It’s rare to see a car here at all; most of them are ensconced in garages that are better built than the houses in Oregon Hill. I hope I’m not getting my oldest, most trusted friend into something that will cause an awkward moment with his parole officer.

  “I’ll be right back,” I tell him, and hope I’m right.

  I look at the lighted dial on my watch. It’s almost nine. It has been a long day.

  Peggy phoned while I was still smoking breakfast. She hardly ever calls just to chat. Small and large emergencies occur often enough to make “chat” calls unnecessary.

  The news was that Les was missing again. He wasn’t there when Peggy got up. He wasn’t on the roof, which I took to be a good sign. I hoped he wasn’t on anybody’s roof, because it wasn’t a good morning for climbing on stepladders and scuttering along Oregon Hill rooftops, hoping you didn’t step through the rotted-out spot that leaks when it rains.

  “It’s been almost two hours, and nobody’s seen him,” she said.

  I reminded her that I don’t at present have a driver’s license.

  “Well, can’t you do something?”

  Les doesn’t have a car either, unless he’s stolen one, so I figured he must be in the general area. To ease my mother’s deep-fried mind, I put on my winter coat and a serviceable hat and took the elevator down, en route to the Hill.

  Clara Westbrook was in the lobby, waiting for a ride somewhere.

  “Goodness,” she said. “It’s not a nice day for a walk, is it?”

  I told her it certainly wasn’t, but that I was on an idiot hunt.

  “Well,” she said, “good luck. If you see somebody else outside in this weather, that’s probably your man.”

  I walked through Monroe Park, taking a zigzag course in hopes of finding Les out there somewhere, but not even the most shelter-phobic bum was braving this day outdoors. He didn’t show up anywhere along the route to Peggy’s.

  She let me in, fazed enough that her eyes weren’t dilated yet. Awesome had come up from the basement to try to comfort her, but he wasn’t doing a very good job of it, reminding her, for some reason, that a homeless guy had frozen to death over by Texas Beach last week.

  “But he was way crazier than ol’ Les,” Awesome added, trying to minimize the damage a bit.

  I went out again, this time headed toward the river. Awesome insisted on coming with me, chattering all the way until I told him, as Peggy does in these situations, to shut the fuck up.

  We weren’t yet to China Street when I looked over and pretty much knew where Les was.

  The remains of David Junior Shiflett’s burned-out house still had a roof, more or less, and no one has been ordered to level the structure yet. The site of my near-death experience last year still gives me the willies, but I was pretty sure what I was going to find when I got inside. The cold overrode Awesome’s fear of the place, and he followed me inside.

  Les was sitting on the floor, over where the stairs used to be. I walked over like I was treading on hot coals. Who knew how much weight those fire-damaged timbers could take?

  “Les,” I said, “don’t you think it’s time to come home? It’s raining a little, and I don’t think you’re going to get much shelter in here.”

  Les looked up. You could see gray sky through the holes. Les ran a roofing company after he left baseball.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I think that roof needs a little work, all right. I don’t know if we can save it or not.”

  He went on about the vagaries of fixing roofs in old, dilapidated buildings as I led him outside, sharing my umbrella. Awesome had a poncho he got from somewhere.

  Les looked back at the place where he’d saved my life.

  “Sometimes, I come here,” he said. “I felt like I was right when I was here.”

  Maybe Les thinks he can regain his off-and-on grip on sanity in the shell of David Junior Shiflett’s house. It kind of makes sense. He never seemed saner than he did the night he broke through that door and pulled me from the flames. Maybe Les can’t break out of the fog anymore unless the stakes are so high that he doesn’t have any choice.

  Either way, I’m glad he was able to see clearly that one night. I will never forget that, and I will never stop looking for him when he wanders off.

  “We found him,” Awesome announced as we came in, a little worse for the chill and damp, happy to share the coffee Peggy’s made. Soon, I smelled the sweet scent of weed and knew my mother was feeling more or less back to normal.

  I had promised to take Peggy over to see her granddaughter in the hospital. I was afraid, though, to risk driving. Too many Richmond cops know me, and would be more than pleased to bust my ass over driving with a suspended license.

  “I can drive,” Les said. I stifled a laugh.

  “He’s tellin’ the truth,” Peggy said. “He doesn’t have to get his license renewed until year after next. If you tell him where to go, he’s a good driver.”

  The thought that Les had been driving my mother around, in somebody’s borrowed car, made me tremble, but I couldn’t come up with a better idea.

  I told them that Les and I would walk over to the Prestwould to get my Accord, and then come back and pick her up.

  Awesome said he would stay and guard the house. I don’t think he likes hospitals very much. Who does?

  Still, it worked out. Les can still drive OK, with a little direction.

  We all went up to Andi’s room, and Peggy, not obviously stoned, gave her a big hug. The two of them have always been pretty close. I think my daughter probably sees more of her grandmother than she does of me. Left out of the conversation, Les and I excused ourselves at some point and stepped into the hallway for a while.

  As the three of us were leaving, the nurse practitioner pulled me aside and said they probably would be releasing Andi on Friday.

  “The mother said you might be taking her.”

  When did Jeanette tell her that?

  “Um, yes. I guess so. But, I mean, will she need special care—you know, special attention?”

  “I’m sure she will,” the nurse practitioner said. “We’ll go over all that with you on Friday.”

  I nodded m
y head, unwilling to admit to a stranger that the thought of taking care of my adult daughter somehow freaked me out. I am a liberal arts major, I wanted to tell her. If I had wanted to minister to the sick, I would have taken a biology course or two.

  On the way back to the car, I told Peggy what the plan was. She told me, again, that she and Les could take care of Andi.

  I told her I was afraid she’d misplace her.

  “She won’t be the most difficult person I’m taking care of, and at least I want to do it.”

  I looked at my mother, wondering: Is it that obvious?

  “Don’t worry,” I tell Peggy. “I’m on it.”

  “You damn sure ought to be.”

  Coming back meant dropping Peggy off, guiding Les back to the Prestwould parking lot, then walking Les back, lest he forget the way.

  When I headed home, it was already two thirty. So I stopped at the 821, had a burger and then, when the food was gone, continued with the longneck Miller High Life’s, which are damn near free. I like to go in, slap down a ten dollar bill, and say, “Keep ’em coming.”

  With nothing to do until tonight except drink and sober up, I went at the former pursuit with some vigor.

  It was dark when I stumbled up the steps. The wind had picked up, and the snow peppering my face had an icy feel to it.

  Upstairs, I didn’t say much to Custalow, just reminded him that he had promised to drive me somewhere.

  “When?”

  “When I wake up.” And I asked him to rouse me at eight. I figured that would be late enough.

  I’m glad for the wind and generally nasty conditions. It’ll make it easier to do what I mean to do.

  I feel like a fool, chasing Bitsy’s long-shot hunch. I’ve learned that long shots seldom pay off. But if you don’t bet, you don’t win.

  So here I am. The Simpsons’ old house looks as grand as Monticello in this light. My knowledge of old homes that are only sporadically lived in, though, tells me that a closer inspection would show broken tiles, half-empty rooms and water damage.

  I don’t intend to do any home inspections tonight, though. I try to make my running shoes as silent as possible as I creep along the driveway, headed for the fence that separates me from the patio. I figure the wind covers what little noise I’m making. There’s a streetlight out front. When I get to the fence, I see that someone has left the light on over the back door, but there’s no other light either inside the house or out. I won’t be in total darkness, but close enough. The red fleece jacket probably wasn’t the best idea, but I forgot to change into my burglar’s clothes. I can feel the garden trowel sticking out of the pocket of my khakis every time I move.